Section: US & Canada

German Chancellor Angela Merkel says Ukraine “is determined” to reach a more stable cease-fire with pro-Russian rebels in the country’s restive east. Merkel, speaking at a joint news conference Wednesday in Berlin with visiting Ukrainian Prime Minister Arseny Yatsenyuk, said the Ukraine situation has been calmer since February...

Congress isn’t alone in its frustration at the Obama administration’s continued inaction (and in some cases deliberate intervention against action) on the controversial Keystone pipeline. Our northern neighbor is fed up with the interminable delays of the project, which would connect Albertan oil sands with Gulf Coast refineries. The...

A year after she was fired as editor of one of Russia’s most popular news websites for running afoul of the authorities, Galina Timchenko has decamped to Latvia and launched a new site to keep the flame of Russian independent media alive. Meduza, published since last October out of a newsroom in Riga, offers an alternative to Russia’s...

My name is Ajarat Bada and I am the Director for The Missing Millennium Development Goal Initiative. We are grateful for the opportunity to contribute to these efforts. Transformative shift number 4 in the High Level panel’s report particularly inspires us. We agree that freedom from conflict and violence is the “essential foundation...

Crimea’s independent Tatar-language television station ATR went off the air Wednesday after Russian authorities refused to give it a broadcasting license. Following Russia’s annexation of Crimea from Ukraine last year, ATR, like other local media outlets, had to reregister by March 31 of this year to continue operating in Crimea. Only...

A lawyer for Nadia Savchenko, a Ukrainian air force officer who is on hunger strike in a Russian prison, says Russian authorities are investigating him for potential “extremist” language posted on his Twitter account. …read more Source: Radio Free Europe / Radio...

German Chancellor Angela Merkel says fighting in eastern Ukraine has been reduced in recent weeks but that the Minsk cease-fire plan has not yet been fully implemented. …read more Source: Radio Free Europe / Radio...

As the Brezhnev years reached their twilight, and it was obvious that Communism would never arrive, the Party decided to rename their moribund system as Real Socialism. The idea was to convey a sense of Marxist progress, but it was taken as confirming the popular view that Soviet assets belonged to everybody and also to nobody. The Soviet Union...

(JTA) — A company partly owned by a Ukrainian-Jewish businessman being sued said it will remove “World Chabad” from the name of an affiliated entity. Attorneys for Alfa Bank, alleging in a lawsuit that Alexander Granovsky defaulted on a loan, wrote to Chabad headquarters in New York last month asking the movement to clarify whether it was...